Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  The morning after we fixed the chicken house he was talking about her at breakfast. Lady hadn’t had a colt the year before and wasn’t going to have one that year. Mother said it was a shame not to be raising a colt after the good price we got for Lady’s last one. Father looked up and said, “What would you think about Babe? I’ve been thinking I might drive her up to Fort Logan this afternoon. Judge Rucker’s got a horse up there that I think might make a good husband for her.”

  I hadn’t been home from school more than five minutes that afternoon before Doctor Stone brought Father. They were leading Babe behind the buggy, and there were wire cuts on her shoulder and off foreleg. Father had court plaster on the side of his face, and his arms weren’t in the sleeves of his coat. When he got out of the buggy I could see that his leg was bandaged. His overalls were torn half off one leg and the bandage showed through.

  Mother, Grace, and I ran out to meet them. We were scared to death, but Father grinned and said it was nothing; that he had just been scratched a little. Doctor Stone didn’t talk that way, though. He said it was lucky Father was still alive. After he and Mother had put Father to bed, they came out into the kitchen, and Doctor Stone told us what had really happened.

  There were big iron gates at the entrance to Fort Logan, and brick walls ran back both ways. Anyone driving on the road outside the wall couldn’t see a team coming out of the Fort till it came through the gates. Father and Babe had been almost up to the entrance when a horseless carriage came racing out of the Fort. Babe had never seen one before and reared. The man who was driving the machine tried to stop it, but it went into a fit of backfiring. Babe whirled off the road and plunged into a gully with a barbed-wire fence running through it. Father was thrown out when the buggy upset, but jumped up and flung his weight onto Babe’s head, so as to keep her from destroying herself in the wire. He was badly bruised and torn before he quieted her.

  That summer on the ranch, without any crops and only a few days of haying, had been good for Father’s lungs. Until the night he was hurt, I don’t think I had heard him cough in months, but that night I could hear him long after I had gone to bed. It must have been that he got his chest squeezed when he was wrestling with Babe down there in that gully.

  Father called me as usual the next morning, but he looked bad when I came down to breakfast. Where it wasn’t skinned, his face was gray, and he had a little hacking cough that sounded as if it started clear in the bottom of his lungs. It was one of those cold drizzly March mornings, and Mother wanted him to go back to bed, but he wouldn’t. He said he had promised the undertaker he would dig a grave that day, and it might be his only chance to build a house that would last until doomsday. Mother didn’t like it, and said that was no time for banter, because if he worked out in the rain in his condition, he might be digging his own grave. Father chuckled a little when he got up from the table, and he rumpled my hair. “We Moodys are tough fellows, aren’t we, Son?” he said. Before he went out, he laid his hand on Mother’s shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Mame, I’m not sick; I’m just scratched up a little. This job will only take half a day, and there’s three dollars in it.”

  The job did take longer than half a day. I had been out of school an hour before Father got home. Mother had him put dry clothes on right away, and made him drink some brandy and hot water. I don’t know whether it was the brandy that made Father talk that night, or whether he had a premonition. He had never told us youngsters anything about his boyhood, or things he had done before we were old enough to remember. That night we sat at the supper table for nearly two hours while Father told us about the little backwoods farm in Maine where he was brought up by his deaf-mute father and mother. And about going to visit his uncle’s family when he was eight years old, so that he could learn to talk with his mouth as well as his fingers. He told us about grafting apple boughs onto birch trees, and about lowering himself down into the well so he could see the stars in the daytime. But he didn’t tell us anything about being the New England bicycle-racing champion—Mother told me about that afterwards.

  I heard him coughing every time I woke up during that night, and the next morning he stayed in bed. The doctor from Littleton came that evening and said Father had pneumonia. He was so sick that the doctor would only let us go in to see him once during the next week. Mother had sent us all to take a long walk on Sunday afternoon so as to get us out from underfoot. She had spent almost every hour with Father since he was taken sick, and her nerves were so unstrung that we irritated her.

  When we came home from our walk, the doctor said we could each go in and see Father for just a minute. Grace went first, and then it was my turn. He looked so bad it frightened me when I went into the room. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, and I guess Father was so sick he couldn’t either. I had found a coil of inch rope lying beside the road when we had been walking, and had brought it home. I could only think to tell Father about the rope. He raised his hand up a little, and I took it. His voice was almost a whisper, and he said, “You take care of it, partner, you may need it.”

  That was the last thing I ever heard him say. Afterwards Mother told me he had asked for me his last day, but the doctor wouldn’t let her send to school for me.

  When we got out of school at noon—ten days after Father was taken sick—Hal was waiting for us with a note. The doctor had sent a nurse to help Mother for the past few days and the note was in her handwriting. It said for us to go to the Roberts’ house for our lunch, and not to come home. They lived a block nearer the schoolhouse than we did, and were good neighbors to us. They had the only telephone in the neighborhood and, while we were eating, the nurse came in to use it. I think it was Cousin Phil she called. After she’d told who she was, she said, “We’ve got to have a tank of oxygen out here right away. Yes. Yes, it’s got to get here right away if it’s going to do any good.”

  Hal was waiting for us with another note when school let out. That one named different houses for us to go to until Mother sent for us. I was to go to the Roberts’. When I got there Mrs. Roberts gave me a piece of bread and jam. I was standing just outside the parlor door eating it when the nurse came in. She didn’t say anything to Mrs. Roberts or to me, but walked right across the parlor and cranked the telephone. I thought it might be something more about oxygen, so I stepped over where I could hear better. The nurse spoke a number into the telephone, and in a minute she told who she was and said she was talking for Mother. Then she said, “Her husband died about twenty minutes ago. You better pick the body up right away. I want to get rid of it as soon as we can; her nerves are going all to pieces.”

  It was too big for me to take all at once like that. I didn’t feel like crying—I didn’t feel like anything. My brain just stopped working for a minute or two. When it started up again it was going round and round like a stuck gramophone cylinder, and was saying over and over, “So long, partner; so long, partner; so long, partner.”

  Bessie and Mrs. Aultland came to stay with Mother that night, and we youngsters stayed where the note had told us to. My mind was sort of numb during the days between Father’s death and the funeral. Things that happened still seem unreal. I do remember that I got a new blue serge suit—the first suit I’d ever had that Mother didn’t make—but I don’t remember where it came from.

  All our old neighbors from the ranch were at Father’s funeral, and I never knew till then how much they really cared for him. After the services, Dr. Browne glanced at Mother’s red-streaked hand and said, “Mrs. Moody, that is surgeon’s blood-poisoning. If you’re ever to raise Charlie’s children, you must come home with me at once.”

  Everybody was shocked except Mother. She was a small woman, and Doctor Browne was a very large man. She looked up into his face and said, “Yes, Doctor, I know. I believe I have no choice in the matter.”

  All our neighbors, both from the ranch and from Littleton, pressed around, offering to take us youngsters in. Cousin Phil said something about writing our o
ther relatives in New England. For just one moment, Mother’s eyes flashed; then she was calm again. “No, Phil, I am sure Charlie wants us all to be together.”

  Then she parceled us out to near neighbors; being sure that Hal went where there was a good cow, and that Muriel went to a motherly woman without too many youngsters of her own. At the end she said to me, “Son, I want you to stay with Laura Pease, where you will be near home and can take care of Lady and the hens.

  “Tomorrow you take Babe over to Mr. Hockaday and tell him Father would have wanted him to have her. He needs a good horse, and he’s a fine, honest man. He’ll pay us all she’s worth.”

  Then she thanked our neighbors and kissed us all around, leaving me till the last. I remember how my lip trembled, wondering if I were the least. She didn’t cry until she put her hand on my head, and said, “You are my man now; I shall depend on you. Mother will be home in two weeks.”

  It was not two weeks, but four. At the end of the first week, before Doctor Browne was sure he wouldn’t have to amputate the arm, Mother sent for Grace and me. Grace had her thirteenth birthday two days after Father died. We harnessed Lady to the spring wagon and drove to Denver, stopping by the river to gather a bouquet of pussy willows.

  At Doctor Browne’s big house on Capitol Hill we were only allowed to see Mother for a few minutes. She was so thin we hardly knew her. Her eyes were deep in their sockets, with black circles around them; and for the first time I noticed white in her hair. Her voice was very low, almost a whisper. She put her good hand out to us and smiled. “Mother is going to be all right,” she said. “I have talked to the Lord a lot about it. He knows you need me, and with Him and Doctor Browne, I shall be all right.”

  Doctor Browne started to lead us from the room. When we had reached the door, Mother called me back. She took my hand and said, “The peas should have been planted on Saint Patrick’s Day. You know where the seeds are in the barn loft. Soak them overnight, and put plenty of hen manure deep in the trench.” I don’t know why that made me cry when I hadn’t before. But from that moment I was sure she was coming home.

  It was late in the afternoon of a pleasant mid-April day when they brought Mother home. Cousin Phil, drove her out in his first automobile—a two-cylinder Buick with shiny brass rods to support the windshield. Doctor Browne and a nurse came with them. They carried Mother into the house and put her to bed downstairs in the parlor. When I came in she was saying to the nurse, “I am perfectly all right now; all I need is my children.” As quickly as I could get out, I harnessed Lady to the spring wagon and started the collection of brothers and sisters.

  Mother could be quite persuasive if necessary. She must have been so with Doctor Browne because, just as we turned into the lane, the Buick was pulling away from our house. Doctor Browne and the nurse waved to us from the back seat as they went by.

  I was the last one into the house, because I had to unhitch Lady. Most of the tears were shed before I got there, and Mother was propped up in bed with Hal still sobbing and trying to bury his nose in her side. Her right hand was heavily bandaged.

  When I came in she organized the first meeting of the clan of Moody. “Now let’s not be sorry for ourselves any more,” she said; “we’ve got lots of other things to do. First, we must get Mother’s hand well. All it will take is good food and good care. I can’t think of anything that would be better for it right now than a good chicken stew.

  “Ralph, suppose you dress that big fat Buff Orpington hen that didn’t lay last winter. Philip, you get Grace two or three armfuls of wood and some shavings, so she can start a fire in the cookstove. And Muriel, do you think you could get the new tablecloth out of the dresser drawer, and set us a table right here by my bed? When you get the fire going, Grace, put on the big iron pot with some fat in it so it will be good and hot when the hen is ready. And, Hal, would you get Mother a drink of water? I can’t think of a thing that would taste so good as a nice cool dipper of water, right from our own well.”

  That first supper was the most memorable meal of my life. The big yellow mixing bowl sat in the middle of the table, filled to the brim with well-browned pieces of chicken, stewed until it was almost ready to fall off the bones, whole potatoes, and carrots—with big puffy dumplings, mixed at the bedside, floating on top.

  Father had always said grace before meals; always the same twenty-five words, and the ritual was always the same. Mother would look around the table to see that everything was in readiness; then she would nod to Father. That night she nodded to me, and I became a man.